Gwendolen (19 page)

I confided my bewilderment when you called at the White House and told me you were a Jew and were going away to Palestine. ‘I know nothing of the Jews,' I said, ‘though clearly some of them are very clever. Herr Klesmer, of course. But I thought Mr Deronda belonged here.'

‘Dan is the spirit of the Abbey,' Sir Hugo said, and gestured towards the walls, books, portraits and the grounds beyond the window. ‘You've seen his unfailing sensibility to every stone and cornice. His going gouges the heart from the place and severs a limb from me.'

‘And I have lost my anchor,' I ventured to say. ‘Through the ordeal of my terrible marriage, Mr Deronda was my hope.'

I did not, I could not, tell Sir Hugo I loved you, but he knew, and put his arm around me. ‘Madness,' he said. ‘Madness to leave all that with your heart and mind you love, to pursue a theoretical idea.'

He then asked, ‘Did Dan tell you why he was in Genoa on the day when Grandcourt drowned?'

I felt apprehension at the revelation that was to follow. You had told me of your reason for being in the city, I had supposed, I think I had supposed, you were in Genoa because you belonged with me. I saw your being there as fate and was unsurprised after Grandcourt was compelled to pull the boat in for repairs, to see you at the
Italia.
A week later it seemed meant to be that you were at the harbour side after I was dragged from the sea. I was so absorbed in my own drama, I had not wondered why else you might be there, other than to be with me. ‘I think Mr Deronda mentioned his mother,' I falteringly said.

Sir Hugo handed me a paper from his desk. ‘Here's a copy of the letter I gave Dan the previous week,' he said. I skimmed the words. I had learned to fear letters.

I did not know what to think. Unknown mother. The words looked strange. ‘She was dying,' Sir Hugo said, ‘and wanted to see her son to explain why, when he was a baby, she abandoned him and gave him to me. The approach of death made her reflect on her past: her Jewish upbringing, her father's control of her, her child's birth. She needed to break a lifetime's silence.'

Sir Hugo told me how apprehensive you were about the meeting, how you wandered the city, went to the opera, explored the Jewish quarter, then were summoned to her rooms. You told him she seemed an unreal figure, theatrical, dressed in black lace, not like a mother.

‘She gave Dan her father's ring,' Sir Hugo said, ‘the symbol of his Jewish allegiance. Her father had wanted her, as a Jewish mother, to rear her eldest son, as if he might be the Deliverer, the new Messiah. His dying wish had been for him to inherit the Charisi papers: the record of the family's origins, migrations and lives. Written in Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Arabic, these papers were in a chest lodged in Mainz with a trusted friend.'

I remembered how you left Genoa to go to Mainz. I felt ashamed it had not occurred to me to ask you why.

‘Then Dan astonished her,' Sir Hugo said, ‘he told her it was momentous to find he had been born a Jew, no news could have delighted him more, that he already instinctively identified with the Jews and wanted to travel East to help build a homeland for them.' He told her about Mirah Lapidoth and her brother Mordecai.

That, I learned, was to be your only encounter with this unknown mother. She did not want to see you again. Sir Hugo, in letters to her about you, extolled your wonderful mind, sympathy and wisdom, but she asked no questions and showed no interest in you or desire to meet you.

You collected the trunk from Mainz and took it to Mordecai in London. He helped you translate and study the archived papers and understand your true heritage and identity.

*

I listened to Sir Hugo with alarm. Your story did not belong to the portrait of you painted in my mind. I had thought you were in love with me, that you were in Genoa for me. But you had not been thinking of me. It was coincidence, not benevolent destiny, that caused us to be in the same city at the same time.

As Sir Hugo in his innocence spoke of your past and we walked the Abbey grounds I felt an onset of the old terror that only my mother's arms could salve. It was as if the landscape, path, stone walls and garden, rose to consume me. I stumbled. A scream lodged in my throat as if in a dream. Here were the facts of it. I was alone and unloved. I was not your concern. Some perverse equation of my mind had made me resist a man who loved me, succumb to a man who ravished me, lose my heart to a man as unavailable as you.

So much for me and men, I thought, and I remembered Captain Davilow. Sir Hugo's concerned face came into my view. He held my arms, said I looked ill and insisted I sit for a while. I pleaded it was nothing more than that the day was hot and I wanted water. I said I wanted the conversation to continue, though perhaps that was enough for today.

*

When next we talked Sir Hugo explained how he came to adopt you. He told me of your mother's wonderful voice, her fame as Alcharisi, the opera singer, and how he pursued and courted her.

‘I was madly in love with her,' he said. ‘She was my once-in-a-lifetime love. We first met in Naples thirty years ago.'

It was hard for me to imagine Sir Hugo madly in love, he seemed so elderly and uxorious, but as he relived in his mind what once he had felt, he became animated and youthful, like an actor who inhabits a different persona. ‘She was newly widowed but wouldn't marry me. She said she couldn't love me or any man. Her father also had just died. Dan was two.'

Sir Hugo told me how your grandfather tyrannised her. ‘She counted as nothing to him. All he wanted was a grandson who would prove to be the Deliverer of the Jews, the new Messiah.' She felt forced into marriage by him, when what she wanted was to be free and true to herself and her talent. ‘She could not love or care for Dan, she saw him as an obstacle,' Sir Hugo said.

Sir Hugo told your mother he loved her so much he would do anything for her:‘One day Dan was sitting on my knees. I playfully said I would pay money to have such a boy. “Take him,” she said, “and bring him up as an English gentleman, and never let him know anything about his parents, and never let him know he was born a Jew.” She suggested Dan use the name Deronda after a branch of her family. Her father, she said, would have cursed her, but she was bitter about his rule: “This you must be, that you must not be. A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.” Now, she said, it was her turn to say who or what her son should be and what she herself should feel. She wanted to relieve Dan from the bondage of being born a Jew and save him from the contempt in which Jews were held.'

What a bleak beginning to your life, I thought. Mamma's love was everything to me and I could not countenance my fate without her. Nor could I understand her need to abandon you. ‘Why,' I asked, ‘if Alcharisi's husband and father were dead, did she need to consider her son's Jewishness?'

Sir Hugo was unclear. He said she was contemptuous of the constraints and strictures of Judaism. ‘I was to feel everything I did not feel and believe everything I did not believe,' she told him: ‘awe for the bit of parchment in the mezuzah over the door; to find it beautiful that men should bind the tephillin on them and women not, to dread lest a bit of butter should touch a bit of meat, to love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue and the howling and gabbling and the fasts and feasts and my father's endless discoursing about Our People. I was to ever care about what Palestine had been. And I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world and all that I could represent in it.'

*

Sir Hugo needed to talk about you, and I, to understand both you and myself, needed to hear your story. We spoke of our loss and bewildered sense of shame. He guided me towards understanding your life and my own. I think this lessened the pain and insult I felt from your actions. I stopped feeling so unworthy.

*

Sir Hugo told me how he kept assiduously to your mother's wishes, loved you as if you were his son and brought you up as a Mallinger, the perfect English gentleman. ‘But,' he said, ‘I responded to Dan's questions with such awkward evasions he became embarrassed to ask what he needed to know.' He said his evasions were lies of omission that turned you into an outsider, uncertain as to who you were, and that he now felt abject about the confusion and loneliness his silence must have caused you as a boy.

We each admitted to selfishness in keeping our promise of secrecy. Sir Hugo wanted you for himself, as if you were his son, and suspected the truth might take you from him. And had I, before marriage, broken my vow to Mrs Glasher and told mamma or uncle the truth about Grandcourt I would have had to relinquish the tainted financial privilege I obtained from marriage to him.

*

As Sir Hugo and I walked and talked in the Abbey grounds, the river winding through the valley below, the view of the hills beyond, I revisited the drama that took place in the
Italia
that week: your past opening like Pandora's box, spilling out confusion, and I, by bizarre coincidence, in the same hotel.

I admired him for being ‘madly in love' with a woman as challenging as your mother: a young widow like me, a woman scornful of marriage and family. Her rebellion inspired me. If she dared to defy the strictures imposed by men then perhaps so might I.

I thought of her portrait in the locket she gave you, her proud face and aloof demeanour and of the sense I had of seeing my own reflection. I, like her, want the wider world, I thought. I too shunned the customs and rituals of control, this to be done on that day, that on the other, because a certain man or men did it so five thousand years past.

I did not believe in God the Father, a Son born from a Virgin and a Holy Ghost, the importance of Moses, the divine authority of the Bible, the landscapes of heaven. Before Grandcourt I believed, tentatively, in myself. As Sir Hugo talked of your princess mother, I resolved to find my own courage again.

I had not met a woman like her. In Pennicote, Catherine Arrowpoint was gifted and clever, but she said amen to Klesmer. In London Mirah Lapidoth would have drowned were it not for you. You were her deliverer. She said amen to you. Your mother dared break free in order to be herself and was the more loved and admired by men because of it. I wished I had met her. I felt I understood her, though of course I did not have her talent.

You did not in Genoa mention her, or the coincidence that within days I was a widow in the same hotel. I wondered what might have transpired had she and I met. She might have wanted me to be your bride, commiserated with the oppression I had endured, admired my courage, liked my Englishness and impetuosity, and seen in me a kindred spirit, a woman who aspired to live an independent life.

My demeanour and beauty, my yearning for independence and the spark in my eyes, Sir Hugo told me, reminded him of her when she was young. Like hers, my own life was denied me because of domination by a controlling man. I endured Grandcourt and his grip on all I was: this you must do, that you must not. The jewellery and clothes I must wear because I was his wife, where I might visit, travel, to whom I might talk, what I must say or sing. But Grandcourt did not justify his control in deference to a higher power, a divine intention, or a force for good. He alone was the determining force.

Your grandfather's patriarchal ambitions were loftier. He looked to you to deliver exiled Jews to their homeland. He had not considered his daughter, her talent, wishes or thinking. He overruled her, but she in time defied him and fulfilled her own ambition.

*

To Sir Hugo I confided how Grandcourt controlled me and crushed my spirit. He said when he heard Grandcourt was dead and you were in Genoa he took it as foregone you would marry me. Lady Mallinger too supposed it to be more than coincidence for you to be there when the drama of Grandcourt's death occurred. He took my arm and lightly said life seldom took the path of true love and easy consolation, and we were obliged to learn the art of making the best of what happens to us.

We spoke of the irony of your wanting the life your mother tried to safeguard you against. She, Sir Hugo and I would have liked you and me to be together in a scene of English happiness: the tall, dark, handsome Eton-and Cambridge-educated squire of a stately home, with his beautiful rose of a wife.

But I was not a true English gentlewoman: I had a wastrel father, subdued mother, lived in a rented house, with no money in the bank, no links to landed estates. I could no more be what by circumstance I was not than match your pioneering zeal, go to Palestine and view it as my Promised Land.

I asked Sir Hugo if he thought you hated your mother for abandoning you, and if reversion to all she despised was your revenge. He did not countenance the idea. You were not a man ever to be driven by revenge or anger, he said, but nor would you be pushed in a direction in which you did not choose to go.

Sir Hugo had an uncensorious heart. Our friendship was a salve. He said that without the truth we could not be free, and urged me to accept that Grandcourt's death was all to the good. ‘See that drowning as a godsend,' he said. ‘It could not have come too soon. The ocean befriended you that day. Now your life can begin.'

*

In that strange summer between my old life and the new, I tried to go beyond my broken dream to the source and complexity of your feelings and actions and of Sir Hugo's and my own. It was hard to hear your story, with its paradox and irony, grasp its dancing logic and illogic and the contrariness of the human heart. Yet hearing it helped my liberation from you. You told me my life would be worth more if I had an interest beyond the drama of my small personal desires. I began to see the wider drama, its creation and implications, its sadness and muddle, and my part in it. I gained in wisdom and though I still could not see what path to take, from that summer on my courage grew, along with my hopes for a life beyond Pennicote, beyond marriage to Grandcourt and even, dare I say it, beyond my dream of you.